Carolee Schneemann

Alright, I know Carolee Schneemann is old news but she's great and the mama of many of the movements and styles I love so I wanted to make a post about her. She's done a lot of crazy stuff like paint her self with mud while standing on a table and then reading from a scroll as she pulled it out of her vagina (which she's most famous for) but she's also done some video art like "Meat Joy", which is a video of a group of nearly naked men and women joyfully rolling around and wrestling with each other covered in chicken and fish and then later paint and paper debris, or a surreal distorted video called "Fuses" of her and her boyfriend having sex which is meant to be from the perspective of her observing cat. Other than this she's done other performance art that has to do with the body, transformation and distortion. I'll put stills and links to some of her video's below!

 From "Meat Joy"
http://www.ubu.com/film/schneeman_meatjoy.html

 From "Fuses"

 http://www.ubu.com/film/schneeman_fuses.html

From "Eye Body"

Other miscellaneous projects (including a shout out to Ana Mendieta called Hand/Heart for Mendieta!)

Lucas Samaras

Lucas Samaras is SO TRIPPY and cool. He was born in Greece but studied at Rutgers, where he met Claes Oldenburg, George Brecht, Roy Lichtenstein and other artists. He worked in painting, sculpture and performance art before starting to make photographs. He is most well known for his "auto-interviews" where he constructs room environments that contain elements and signifiers from his personal life and history. While everything is self-investigatory, he is very experimental in his work and creates these awesome distorted and mutilated forms in his images. I feel like he approaches topics that I'm really interested in but does it in a completely different way than I would ever even imagine to do.

Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban American performance artist. She worked with video, sculpture and photography, often incorporating multiple or all of these media into her pieces. Her work was generally autobiographical and focused a lot on ideas of feminism, violence, gender and belonging. She worked a great deal with natural material and was known for her "earth-body" artwork. The Allen actually has multiple pieces by her, some of which are on display right now in the Religiion, Ritual, and Performance exhibit in the Modern and Contemporary Art Wing. I think her work is subtle and delicate, but is powerful and dark. Sometimes I find her video's disturbing in their quiet statement, but I know it's something important that I need to pay attention to.

Harold Feinstein

Harold Feinstein is really just an old school, street and documentary photographer from New York in the 40's, 50's etc... but I think his photographs are really beautiful and I feel like he avoids exploiting or disrespecting his subjects.